As Startup Community Manager for Bank of Ireland in Cork, Ita O’Sullivan aims to help Cork startups thrive. Ita achieves this through providing practical resources, like Workbench at 70 Patrick St and supporting a full calendar of events that are useful to the business and tech community. Ita, a qualified product manager, also offers startups 1:1 support on idea validation and business model canvas, leveraging her 6 years of experience with Google. Most recently this has led to an 8 week idea validation course run in conjunction with UCC Ignite. Ita’s online article “90 days ago I left google to work for a bank, here’s what I learned” has went viral with over 250,000 reads and tens of thousands of contacts from people looking to discuss their futures.